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While leafing through The Big New Yorker Book of Cats, an anthology of stories, poems, New Yorker covers and cartoons featuring cats, we found David Schickler’s story, The Smoker. We read The Smoker in Schickler’s story collection Kissing in Manhattan and we liked that collection a lot. It reminded us of Nine Stories by a certain other writer. However, we could not recall the presence of a cat in the story.

So we read the story again. We still like it very much, and it does have a cat in it. Here’s Robert Sean Leonard reading The Smoker for NPR’s Selected Shorts.

I am Saffy and I demand that you put me in a short story. As the main protagonist.

Read the short story by David Schickler at The New Yorker.

Written, produced and directed by Andrew Leavold, the authority on Filipino pop cinema. Tickets to the World Premiere of The Search for Weng Weng are now available for only Php143. Part of the proceeds will be donated to #YolandaPH victims in Visayas. For ticket reservations, please send a personal message to http://facebook.com/TheSearchForWengWeng.

From the moment we read the kiddie version of The Sword in the Stone in the Walt Disney Encyclopedia we have been devoted to The Once and Future King by T.H. White. The epic tetralogy consisting of The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle in the Wind remains one of our favorite books: every time we pick it up, we end up rereading our favorite parts. Wart meeting Merlin and Archimedes in the woods. Wart discovering his true identity. Morgause’s horrible children hunting a unicorn. Everything, basically. It is our gold standard for fantasy. We pity those who have not read it.

Our love for TOAFK has guided many of our choices: we took a Medieval English lit course so we could read White’s sources, we bought Roxy Music’s album Avalon because of its title, and we memorized Monty Python and the Holy Grail, our favorite film of the Arthurian tales (along with John Boorman’s Excalibur. We also like Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac, except that the knights’ brightly-colored tights crack us up. There have been some truly crappy adaptations, like that one with Clive Owen).

Whenever we spot a different edition of TOAFK, we buy it. Unfortunately, our existing copies don’t do justice to White’s masterpiece. They’re too plain, the designs are unimaginative, the typefaces are minuscule. They are simply not worthy.

A Book of Hours at Yale’s Beinecke Library. Photo from the Digital Scriptorium.

An edition of The Once and Future King should look like a medieval Book of Hours, hand-painted by the artists commissioned by the Duc de Berry.

The Meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere in The Romance of Lancelot du Lac. Photo from the British Library.

It must be have illuminated pages, leather bindings, locks.

Gilded-edge page. Photo from Wikipedia.

At the very least, it must have gilded-edge pages.

The Folio Society edition, with engravings by John Lawrence

We googled existing designs of TOAFK and found this one from the Folio Society. It’s bound in cloth and prettier than our copies (This is not difficult to achieve). So we’re probably getting this, but if you spot a more worthy edition, let us know.

Famous fans of TOAFK: Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr.

Our favorite comic book title of the month is Crime-Fighting Call Center Agents. On the basis of the title we would buy the comics, the T-shirt, the lunchbox and accessories. So the fact that the comics by Noel Pascual and AJ Bernardo are hysterically funny would be a bonus if that weren’t the rationale for their existence. The…heroes…of Crime-Fighting Call Center Agents (CFCCA) are actual call center agents but not actually crime-fighters—they just find themselves in dangerously stupid/stupidly dangerous situations and try to survive using their limited wits.

Issue #1, in which the four colleagues are threatened by a psycho biker, is hilarious, but Issues 2 and 3, which constitute an hommage to a recent Pinoy horror movie classic, is brilliant. In its combination of geekiness and idiocy, CFCCA is unrivaled. Consider this bit of dialogue:

– Ngayon na nga lang ako manliligaw, sa pamilya pa ng mga aswang.
– Kaya nga ako, lahat ng gusto kong pormahan, sinasabuyan ko muna accidentally ng holy water.

Or this masterful teaser for a future issue:

Pati ang panel na ito, hindi pa cleared sa teaser na ito. Masyado kasing game-changing, sobrang gandang twist sa istorya, na pag nabasa mo, iisipin mo: “Ano ito! Sobrang astig, parang nagkaka-Stendhal Syndrome na yata ako!”

Tapos pagtingin mo sa relos mo, year 2037 na pala.

Get your own copies. Now. CFCCA is available at Comic Odyssey at Galleria, Planet X at Glorietta 4, Filbar’s at Festival Mall Alabang, Bookay-Ukay at Maginhawa St, UP Village, Chapter IX Books at Circle C Mall QC, and Druid’s Keep at The Fort Strip, Bonifacio Global City. Each issue costs Php75. CFCCA will also be available at the ReaderCon on 7 December at the Rizal Library at Ateneo, and at Better Living Through Xerography at the Lopez Museum on 14 December. Look them up on facebook.

Designer Beruna Girl combines her fan obsessions with her love of typography in handmade notebooks emblazoned with quotes from Sherlock, Game of Thrones, Fringe, J.R.R. Tolkien. The Fandom Jots measure 9.8 x 14 cm, with heavy kraft paper covers and plain white pages. A set of three notebooks costs Php365-456. You can buy them online.

And here’s the new trailer for Sherlock.

What really happened between Sherlock Holmes and the pavement? Has he returned to save Watson from that moustache? Season 3 premieres in the US 19 January 2014; earlier in the UK.

I am Drogon! And I am burdened with glorious purpose.

You may kneel and kiss my…

Stay here with Shai Hulud, Mickey Rourke, while I secure the perimeter.

All clear. Soon these seats will be crawling with humans.

Hearken to them. Sound the alarm, we are at NERDCON 3.

Circling the book table. Photo by Juan.

We had a blast at our Meet and Greet-Book Swap-Merienda last Saturday at the 7th floor events space of the WSI Corporate Center. We were so busy yakking with our guests, caffeinating, and making sure Drogon didn’t sneak off in someone’s bag that we didn’t have time to take pictures. If you were there, please email your photos to saffron.safin@gmail.com and we will post them later.

Drogon and his human, photo by allancarreon

Thanks to WSI for our excellent venue and facilities. (They have spaces for seminars, parties, wedding receptions, family reunions, clandestine superhero conventions and so on. For rental inquiries, contact Bon Perez, (02)8585405.) Thanks to J.Co for the coffee and doughnuts, and to our readers for bringing their books to the Book Swap. Drogon would like to thank everyone who brought kibble and treats–he is now contemplating a career in cuteness-based extortion.

Get ready for a lot of photos of readers posing with Drogon.

We had 90 minutes between appointments so we ducked into a screening of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. The first movie was a snooze, so we figured we’d leave in half an hour or so. Well we liked what we saw of Catching Fire—the other characters have developed backbones to match that of Jennifer Lawrence’s heroine—and we were sorry to have to leave at the 90-minute mark. But we will catch the rest of it soon. In the meantime, here’s another brilliant Sesame Street parody.

Cookieness Evereat and Pita (bread): masterful.

As you know, in the first movie Peeta and Katniss won the Hunger Games by being a love team. At the start of the second movie they embark on their victory tour of the twelve districts, during which they are forced to sell their fake romance. They appear before cheering crowds chanting “Peeta!” and “Katniss!”

Well if Brad + Angelina = Brangelina,
and Ben + Jennifer = Bennifer
then Peeta + Katniss = Peeniss.

Picture crowds lining the streets chanting that.